1 Sound and Sense in Britain, 1770-1840 A Conference and Workshop at the Heyman Center for the Humanities May 12-13, 2017 Sponsored by: The Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities ERC ‘Music in London’ Project (KCL), dir. Roger Parker Organizer contact information: Carmel Raz: +1 203 508 4159 James Grande: +44 7773 525 298 Hotel: Aloft Harlem 2296 Frederick Douglass Blvd, New York, NY 10027 Phone: (212) 749-4000 Friday Dinner (7:15pm): Community Food and Juice, 2893 Broadway New York, NY 10025 Saturday Dinner (6:30pm): Lido 2168 Frederick Douglass Blvd New York, NY 10026 Phone: (646) 490-8575 Dropbox for Saturday’s workshop (papers will be uploaded in early May) Venue: Second floor common room, the Heyman Center for the Humanities [map and directions on next page] Map of path from hotel to the Heyman Center (in-campus directions below): The walk from the hotel to campus is pleasant and secure, but does include a steep set of stairs in Morningside Park. For those with mobility issues (or at night), we recommend a taxi or uber for the trip---shared, this will be cheaper and more direct than public transit. 2 General Directions: also at http://heymancenter.org/visit/ The Heyman Center for the Humanities is located on East Campus. Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway, and walk up the steps of Low Library. Turn right (east) at the top of the first set of steps, and keep walking east until you come to Philosophy Hall. Turn left (north) at Philosophy Hall and walk until you see a ramp on your right going (east) over Amsterdam Avenue. Take that ramp and walk straight ahead, past the law school on your right and Casa Italiana and the International Affairs Building on your left until you come to a short flight of steps going into the East Campus Residential Center. Take those steps, which will bring you to a security booth for East Campus Residential housing. Show a picture ID to the guard and walk straight (north) through the courtyard. You will see the Heyman Center building in front of you. Best Route from Aloft Harlem: Enter the Wien Hall Gate on 116th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. Walk past Wien Hall, then turn right and make a sharp turn up the staircase to the left, which leads to East Campus. Check in with the guard and follow the sign to the Heyman Center. Second Floor Common Room Upon entering the Heyman Center, turn left and take the stairs or elevator one flight up. The Common Room is the first right in the second floor hallway. 3 Schedule: Friday (Public Talks) 1:00: Coffee, meet & greet at the Heyman Center, welcome remarks 1:30-3:45: Panel 1: Globalization, Colonisation, Revolution David Kennerley, “The Lancashire and Cheshire Working Men’s Singing Classes and the Sounds of Chartism” Maria Semi, “Sound and Senses Going Global in 18th C. Britain” Josephine McDonagh, “John Galt and the Sounds of Colonisation” Chair: Sejal Sutaria 3:45-4:15: Reception 4:15-6:30: Panel 2: Sound, Science, Spectacle Kathy Fry, “Mary Somerville’s Sound Accomplishments ca. 1834” Melissa Dickson, “Tuning In with the Stethoscope in the 19th C.” Oskar Cox Jensen, “Of Sight and Sound, or, Realising The Enraged Musician” Chair: Benjamin Steege 7:15: Dinner at Community Food and Juice, 2893 Broadway 4 Schedule: Saturday (Workshop) The workshop will be devoted to discussion of each paper and broader themes of general interest. • Each author will informally introduce their paper (ca. 5 minutes). This is an opportunity to play any audio / video examples or show additional images that may not have been included in your paper. • The chair will lead the discussion, posing initial questions to be addressed by all workshop participants, and opening up the collective discussion. 9:30-10: Coffee and breakfast 10:00-12:30: Session 1: Power, Interest, Liberty James Chandler, “‘Prophetic Harmony’: Wordsworth and the Sound of Power” Rowan Boyson, “Pleasure, Pollution and the Prosodic Turn” Nicholas Mathew, “Haydn, Interest, and the Commercial Streetscape in 1790s London” Chair: Eileen Gillooly 1:30-2:15: Session 2: Ecomusicologies Ellen Lockhart, “Lupus Tonalis” Jonathan Hicks, “Aurality, Mobility, and Fingal’s Cave” Chair: Emily Bloom 3:15-4:45: Session 3: Speaking and Listening James Grande, “On Tongues and Ears: Divine Voices in the Modern Metropolis” Carmel Raz, “‘To ‘Fill Up, Completely the Whole Capacity of the Mind’: Listening and Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland” Chair: Dustin Stewart 5:00-6:00 Discussion 6:30 Dinner at Lido, 2168 Frederick Douglass Blvd 5 Participants 1. Benjamin Steege ([email protected]) 2. Carmel Raz ([email protected]) 3. David Kennerley ([email protected]) 4. Dustin Stewart ([email protected]) 5. Eileen Gillooly ([email protected]) 6. Ellen Lockhart ([email protected]) 7. Emily Bloom ([email protected]) 8. James Chandler ([email protected]) 9. James Grande ([email protected]) 10. Jonathan Hicks ([email protected]) 11. Josephine McDonagh ([email protected]) 12. Katherine Fry ([email protected]) 13. Maria Semi ([email protected]) 14. Melissa Dickson ([email protected]) 15. Nicholas Mathew ([email protected]) 16. Oskar Cox Jensen ([email protected]) 17. Rowan Boyson ([email protected]) 18. Sejal Sutaria ([email protected]) 6 Abstracts PANEL 1: GLOBALIZATION, COLONISATION, REVOLUTION (Chair: Sejal Sutaria) The Lancashire and Cheshire Working Men’s Singing Classes and the Sounds of Chartism David Kennerley (King’s College London) For a few years in the mid-1840s, Manchester reverberated to the sounds of huge choirs of hundreds of working-class men and women, participants in a newly-created network of sight-singing classes across Britain’s industrial heartland. This endeavour was initiated and financed by local millowners, clergymen, town councillors and magistrates. This paper explores the motives behind this phenomenon, viewing it as part of a contest over civic ‘sonic identity’. For it is no coincidence that these classes began immediately after the dramatic events of the Chartist-inspired general strike of 1842. Haunted by the sounds of the crowds that had seized control of the streets and mills, Manchester’s men of property and authority sought to reconstruct the region’s ‘sonic identity’ through the disciplined, harmonious sound of the singing class. However, this was far from a straightforward exercise in ‘social control’. As the organisation’s archive reveals, its working-class participants used the classes to pursue their own ends and pleasures, rather than succumb to the middle-class disciplinary agenda. Nonetheless, middle-class patronage remained firm, suggesting that the sound of the classes fulfilled the psychological needs of Manchester’s propertied classes, deeply disturbed by their sonic experience of 1842. The same sounds could therefore mean different things, and carry widely varying political resonances, to different groups of performers and hearers, rendering any simple notion of ‘social control’ through culture hard to sustain. Moreover, it emphasises the immense impact of the sounds of Chartism upon the middle classes, not only in provoking this kind of musical philanthropy, but also in strongly inflecting their affective response to massed vocal ensembles. Sounds and Senses Going Global in Eighteenth Century Britain Maria Semi (University of Torino) ‘Sound’ and ‘sense’ can be thought of as absolute entities: measurable, quantifiable (at least in the case of sound), and universal. Up to a certain point in history, this was the common way of thinking about them. There have been mechanistic models, or more psychologically oriented models, but the general idea was that there ‘must be’ a model which would work at all times and for all (unimpaired) people. During the timespan with which we are concerned, a noticeable shift occurs. A growing awareness of the “national properties” of sounds emerges, and of the impact these sounds have on a given audience, because of their “national nature”. Not only the physical nature of sounds is relevant, but also – in Lockean terms – what they are ‘associated’ with by the very person who experiences them. 7 John Galt and the Sounds of Colonisation Josephine McDonagh (King’s College London) This paper concerns elements of sound within the work of John Galt, the Scottish regional novelist, whose ‘genuine homely Scotch’ fiction participated in the early nineteenth century global circulation of Scottish dialect. Galt was also the founder of the Canada Company, a joint-stock company for the development of colonial settlements in Upper Canada, which necessitated his travel to and occupation in Canada over an extended period in the 1820s. Galt wrote about his work as a colonist extensively in varied writings over the next several years. The two strands of Galt’s career – as Scottish regionalist writer, and Canadian colonist - have usually been treated in isolation from each other. Attending to questions of sound, however, reveals a mesh of interconnecting interests that underpins both. This paper considers how in his regional works from the early 1820s, we can see the emergence of a set of literary techniques which include a sustained interest in sound and the ways in which acoustic phenomena produce social space. This is mostly evident in his selected use of dialect. Later on, in works on colonisation and his experience in Canada, sound will provide a means through which to conjure spaces, create communities, and dominate nature. PANEL 2: SOUND, SCIENCE, SPECTACLE (Chair: Ben Steege) Mary Somerville’s Sound Accomplishments ca. 1834 Kathy Fry (King’s College London) Mary Fairfax Somerville’s best-selling treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences – first published in 1834 and then revised and republished through a further nine editions – has been widely celebrated in the history of science for its broad public appeal, its unification of scientific disciplines, its descriptive clarity and sublime perspective on nature and the cosmos.